Nosce te ipsum

The ever insightful DrunkenBlog has just published it's 500th post and filled that distinguished spot with an extensive interview with Brent and Sheila Simmons of Ranchero software - makers of NetNewsWire and MarsEdit (the product I'm using the write this very entry).

Brent is an interesting guy who happens to write some really solid software. It's amazing to me to think that just a few years ago, I'd never heard of an RSS aggregator and now, thanks to Brent's work - I get the vast majority of my information via the web using NetNewsWire and not the traditional web browser approach. The interview is an interesting read - in part because he and Sheila are living the dream of running a small software business as partners and as husband and wife. I think it's amazing that they somehow manage to pull it off but I for one sure are glad that they do.

Philip Greenspun explains what the Harvard Business School applicants did that resulted in their being denied admission. It's a real stretch to call it hacking. And that's an understatement.

This stuff is getting so out of hand. These people's futures just changed radically because of something so silly. Ironic, given the huge role that Universities have played in the history of the web and the Internet itself - I wonder what Marc Andreessen must think about something like this - certainly not likely that it crossed his mind when he was busy inventing the web browser back in his own college days.

Who needs television or block buster movies when reality provides such amusing headlines. It's just unfortunate that this isn't entertainment but real life where real lives are being affected by such stupidity.

A follow-up post from Rogers Cadenhead.

"...Incidents like these make me wonder how anyone can argue that modifying a URL is inappropriate, much less compare it to breaking in to a computer system.

If you make something available at a URL, you've invited the world to view it. Harvard should be dropping the hammer on ApplyYourself, the company whose poor programming revealed admission decisions prematurely, not on these hapless applicants."

I think that I have now seen it all - I literally had to re-read this headline from Slashdot.

Torvalds Switches to a Mac

Linux creator Linus Torvalds said this afternoon that he's now running an Apple Macintosh as his main desktop, mainly for work reasons, although partly simply because he's a self-described "technology whore" and got the machine for free.

The next check was the date - April 1st? Nope - hmm... Better read the article:

From the article:

Torvald's response came quickly and succinctly. "My main machine these days is a dual 2GHz G5 (aka PowerPC 970) - it's physically a regular Apple Mac, although it obviously only runs Linux, so I don't think you can call it a Mac any more ;)" he said.

"As to the why ... Part of it is simply that I wanted to try something else, and I felt like there were enough people testing the x86 side that it certainly didn't need me. Part of it is that I personally believe there are two main architectures out there: Power and x86-64 are what _I_ think are the two most relevant ones, and I decided that I had to at least check the other side of it out seriously if I really believed that," said Torvalds.

Ok, all is right within the universe - Torvalds is using a Powermac G5 but of course he's running Linux on it. You can only imagine that Linus can has an almost unlimited amount of hardware at his disposal so this really isn't that much of a stretch. I wish he would have gone into some more detail about his experiences on the machine, distros, etc.

Be sure to check out what's sure to be an interesting round of discussions on Slashdot.